


i have never seen my sister

by bizzarity



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Humanstuck, in which the scourge sisters are actually sisters, no names were used in this fic, there are ships but it's not a shippy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:39:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bizzarity/pseuds/bizzarity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I have never seen my sister, but our life painted a beautiful picture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i have never seen my sister

I have never seen my sister.

I know she is strawberry blonde, with almond-shaped blue eyes that our dad says are the color of the inside of a Magic 8 ball.  
I know that she’s beautiful. But I have never seen her.

She would read to me, when we were little. I didn’t know Braille, not yet. Her voice (a little raspy, like she smoked in a past life) would become my world for just a little while. Whole universes were created behind my blind eyes—roaring waterfalls, the chirping of exotic birds, the loud, gruff voices of pirates. Sun on skin, wind in hair. Sensations that stole my breath away.

Sometimes, after I learned Braille and could read on my own, albeit slowly, she’d still whisper to me, stories from our childhood. Peter Pan, the Little Mermaid, the Tortoise and the Hare. She’d lie above me, she on the top bunk and I below, whispering the words we both knew by heart, my mouth moving to the words as she built our favorite adventures with nothing but quiet phrases. 

When I was seven, she was nine. We went on a road trip from Pennsylvania, to Florida, to go to Disney World, because our parents had won some kind of radio talk show contest. She sat next to me in the car, watching the world go by, describing it to me to paint a picture of my surroundings. I laid back in my seat the whole drive, the window next to me open to the chill Appalachian air, listening to the scenery. The feeling of cool wind on my face, probably mussing my hair (but I didn’t care), with my mom and dad in the front bickering over a road map, and my sister, relating the forest and cloudy skies and rocky slopes in that past-life-smoker-voice of hers, came together to create a car ride that completely eclipsed the sounds and smells of cheap funnel cakes and Mickey Mouse ice cream bars.

When I was eleven and she was thirteen, she threw me a party for my birthday—the first I’d ever had. She invited some girls from my school that I supposed I considered friends. She even did my hair up so the short curls just brushed my ears when I turned my head, so I could feel elegant and grown-up even when she knew I could never see what I looked like. Our mom made my favorite cake—red velvet—with blue-colored cream cheese icing that she said matched the color of my eyes perfectly. I ended up tripping over myself as I walked out front to greet my guests, and I spilled my drink on the new tablecloth despite the wide-based cups and sisterly supervision. To make me feel better, she told me that it was okay, because I could get away with anything, no one would ever see, she said. She made me laugh my nerves away with a joke and a hug and a squeeze of the hand.

One day, when I was twelve and she had just turned fourteen, she brought home her first boyfriend, a stuttering boy who was the same height as me, with a quiet, musical voice, the opposite of my sister’s. He was kind to me and helped me with my math homework, and my sister called him silly but I could hear her fond smile. They broke up a while later, because she said he wanted a “commitment”. She said she thought it was silly, that they were only freshmen in high school; no one could want a committed relationship at that age. I heard her sigh and I put my hand on her cheek, to catch the single tear that would always escape no matter the barricades my sister put up to block them.

Later that same year, just before the end of summer break, she met a boy in town on vacation visiting family. He said he was from Washington and didn’t like Pennsylvania too much, but he loved making new friends. My sister talked about him a lot, how he liked pranks and magic and Matthew McConaughey and bad movies. The would stay up in the den for hours watching movies with fire and romance and all the fun stuff that twelve-year-olds weren’t supposed to be influenced by. But they let me watch with them, once, my sister quietly rasping the scene into my ear, while the voices of actors and actresses, fraught with emotion, played in front of me on the nice speakers our dad splurged on the year before. He had to go back to Washington after a few weeks, just after the nights turned cool and the crickets stopped chirping.

When I was fourteen and her sweet 16 was three days away, I met a tall boy with a cool voice and sunglasses, who talked incessantly and liked to rap. He said he was legally blind without his shades, and even then he couldn’t see much. He joked that if we ever went out we could go in sweatpants and hoodies and we wouldn’t even care because all we saw was voices. My sister teased us and called us a couple, when really we weren’t, we were just best friends. And really, that was all it was. He said he wasn’t interested when we brought it up, that I was a really great person and I deserved the best but he just wasn’t interested in a relationship, and he hoped that I wouldn’t be sad or anything, but he just wasn’t into girls. And I didn’t mind, but I was a little let down because he was the closest thing to a boyfriend I’d ever had. But I was happy for him when he found someone to listen to him talk and also kiss him every once in a while. 

Her birthday always fell on Valentine’s Day. Her long-distance boyfriend from Washington surprised her on her seventeenth by showing up at our door with a single rose that smelled like heaven and felt like silk, so cool and smooth you weren’t sure if you were even touching it.

When she was eighteen and I was sixteen, I went to a dance at my sister’s school. It was supposed to be a “homecoming,” they said, but it was truly just some bad music and chalky cookies and Kool-Aid punch that the seniors tried to spike. I danced with a friend of a friend, a boy with a grumpy voice and soft hands, a junior like me. I think he was drunk. He talked about leadership and his brother and my sister and my school and at the end I had to kiss him to shut him up.

She went to a college just a few miles away after high school, when I was a junior and seventeen. By then I had made a few good friends, and knew her friends well enough to arrange a 19th birthday party for her. I made red velvet cake (with help from our mom) with chocolate icing, because my sister never really liked the cream cheese kind. I celebrated with her and her friends, instead of just with our family, because she decided I needed to feel like an adult for once. I spent time with my old friend with the shades, and we laughed about how lame the place was, how we should totally skip and go to Burger King or Sheetz or something. We ended up walking into a McDonald’s and ordering three chocolate shakes and four large fries, to share.

A couple months after she started college, I had to go to an appointment with a new doctor to get a physical for my first job as a counselor at a camp for the blind. His office was on the third floor and my sister had to run to grab her purse from the car. I turned to follow her characteristic voice to figure out where she was going, to ask her where I could sit down. I took a step and couldn’t find the ground beneath my feet. I was crumpled on the landing below the stairs and crying because I didn’t know where I was, or where my cane was, or where my cell phone was, and everything _hurt_. The ground was cold, and there must have been an air conditioning vent above me, because I could feel my hair stirring and tickling my nose in the little draft. My sister found me there, sobbing quietly, twisted at odd angles. She held me, holding my face in her hands and my head in her lap, whispering the words of the fairy tales from so long ago to help me stay calm while paramedics came.

They kept me in the hospital for too long because they thought my brain had been damaged or something. My sister called them scammers, yelled at them, telling them that they only wanted money, they didn’t want to really help anyone. Or so our mother told me. All I could hear was the morphine drip.

When I was seventeen and she was nineteen, her Washington boyfriend transferred to the same college as her. He came to visit the house every so often, for a laughter-filled dinner and a few silly movies or a game of Monopoly. He’d always sit next to me, between my sister and I, and I could smell his cologne or aftershave or whatever guys use to make themselves smell like guys.

For my eighteenth birthday, my sister took me out to see the musical Wicked at the PAC downtown. Every once in a while, when we encountered a scarce part in the play with not enough dialogue or song to explain the happenings onstage, she’d whisper in my ear, the same voice that would tell me stories before I could read. It was like all those years ago, lying in bed and listening to adventures of someone far away. I couldn’t help but wonder who I was more like, Glinda or Elphaba. I asked my sister, and she laughed, saying that I had the spirit and drive of Elphaba, but the beauty and charm of Glinda. I didn’t believe her, but I smiled anyway because I could hear her smiling too.

A month or so after, we decided to dye our hair blue. The dye smelled really horrible, but it felt cooling and soft on my hair. I tried to get her to let me try to dye her hair, but she said no, who’d want people to ask if a blind girl did her hair, because then she’d have to answer yes.

My sister and I, when she was twenty-one and I nineteen, went to the beach in Florida for spring break. I lay on the sand for hours, letting the sun fall on me like a summer rain, only warmer and definitely less wet. The roaring of the waves was a little frightening at first, because it came from everywhere at once and echoed all around the hotels lining the beach. The water was chilly, and the riptide tugged at my legs, a playful child trying to snatch my feet from under me. A bit of seaweed caught on my calf and I screamed, and I’m sure my sister fell over from laughing.

When my sister was twenty-two, and I would turn twenty in eight days, she bought me a book that wasn’t in Braille or audiobook form. She read it to me, chapter by chapter, when she was at home during the weekends. There was an author in the book, who wrote a story, and the main character loved this story. But the thing is, the author was a total douche in the end. And his story ended in the middle of a

**Author's Note:**

> ok i am REALLY SORRY about how shitty that ending was but i s2g i couldnt think of anything and this fic has been sitting in my folder for months now  
> if anyone wants to write the ending then go right ahead i welcome you  
> yeah sorry  
> shrugs  
> (the book mentioned in the last bit is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green you should read it)


End file.
